A decent but forgettable popcorn movie

Rating: 6/10 (14 November 2014)

Guillermo del Toro brings his unique creative sensibilities to a genre that's been pushed into the ground, and while the results are entertaining and cool to watch it still has this "been-there-done-that" feel. For one, this level of destruction has been done before in all of the Transformers movies, and while it's more competently filmed here you can't escape the feeling that you've seen most of this stuff before. A few quibbles about this: no attention is paid whatsoever to collateral damage, but then again, that's a problem with the violence in most PG-13 movies. Also, the decision to film most of the action at night and around the ocean results in it being a little hard to follow due to the poor lighting and the fact that the robots and kaiju take up most of the screen because of their immense size. Moving on, I thought that the comedic relief in the form of two bickering scientists was well written and played, although it didn't really serve the story too much until the end. In fact, the story as a whole wasn't really spectacular, and was filled with a lot of cliché moments and was very predictable. Despite all of these things, it was fun to watch and I had a good time. An entertaining, but ultimately forgettable, popcorn flick.